There are people out there who get paid to follow the odds. They are called risk assessment managers. They base their entire careers on following statistics and making (supposedly) impartial judgements based on those statistics. They determine if someone gets a loan, job, contract, etc. These people are dream killers. These people are not artists.

Artists tend to thumb their noses at the status quot in my opinion because they’ve never been a part of it, willfully or otherwise. They don’t fit. This exclusion automatically changes their very perception of reality. So having “realistic expectations” that the rest of normal society seems to understand is a foreign concept to them. It needs to be.

To function as an artist, to be able to think outside of the box (or look at the box and see a chicken, or decide that there is an entire universe in the box, or the box is just an illusion to distract mankind from the overlords of dystopia), reality needs to keep its distance from abstract thought processes and creative problem solving.

If you’re too busy fixating on reality, you can’t concentrate on being creative. For any artist, that can be debilitating. Why create something if no one but you is ever going to appreciate it? There, you’ve already given up.

Again, in my opinion we already have enough risk assessment managers. We have more than enough people who are perfectly happy to go with the flow. We have too many people who give up before even trying because the odds are against them. We will always need more dreamers, more artists, more envelope pushers, more progressive thinkers.

Reality isn’t going anywhere. Sooner or later you need to face it. Make it a positive reflection of your efforts, not some insurmountable wall that impedes them. Don’t give up. You’re better than that.